Recipe kit delivery startup Gousto has raised £10 million to help it take on HelloFresh

Gousto founder and CEO Timo Boldt. Gousto Recipe kit delivery service Gousto has raised £10 million from investors as it looks to take on the likes of HelloFresh in the increasingly busy food delivery market.

The funding round, which includes BGF Ventures, Unilever Ventures, MMC Ventures, Angel CoFund, and Barclays, comes less than a year after Gousto's £9 million Series B round.

Gousto, which employs 200 people in London and Lincolnshire, has built a platform that allows people to select meals they like the look of from online weekly menus and get the recipes — along with their pre-portioned ingredients — delivered directly to their house.

You can either order enough ingredients for two people or four people. Each meal costs from £3.75 per person, depending on how many meals you order and how many people each meal is for. In addition to main meals, Gousto also delivers wine, desserts, and healthy snacks for kids.

The four-year-old company, founded by former hedge fund manager Timo Boldt, said it currently delivers almost 100,000 meals each week to customers across the UK.

Gousto

"Gousto is on a mission to eliminate food waste. We can only achieve our mission if we make customers' lives easier, better and more natural. This means giving customers the most recipe choice and discovery of new cuisines," said Boldt in a statement.

"We offer the fastest turnaround time and delivery options, delivering incredibly fresh, seasonal, and high quality food. The additional funding will allow Gousto to accelerate our efforts to create the very best customer experience, and allow us to achieve our food waste mission. It's really simple, but this way we please our customers, build a sustainable business, and do good in the world."

When asked what differentiates Gousto from HelloFresh, Boldt said: "You have to wait up to eight days for delivery. And you cannot add wine, dessert or anything else. In contrast, Gousto offers the most recipe choice, the most delivery flexibility, and almost 100 additional products to choose from to really have awesome cooking experiences. From a business point of view, Gousto is owned by its team, whilst Hellofresh is owned by Rocket Internet, which matters as we are determined to build a culture of ownership focusing relentlessly on long term sustainability.

"But at the end of the day, I'm very thankful for HelloFresh to be around. Most companies have ten competitors, we only have one serious competitor, which means we are not alone at building category awareness. And what's most important is that we operate in the £200bn grocery market, which has an online penetration of 5% going to 10% by 2020 (IGD). this is a seismic shift and we are in the best position possible to benefit from it in the long term."

Gousto

Rory Stirling, an investor at BGF Ventures, told Business Insider earlier this year: "The reason we invested in Timo and Gousto is because we believe he can build the best business longer term. We're willing to take that really patient approach. We believe there's a fundamental shift in the way people buy and consume food at home over the next 10 year period. Timo's vision for that very much aligns with ours and we think he's got the executional ability to do it. He may not necessarily have the most hype in the market but we believe he's doing it right long term."

Simon Calver, another investor at BGF Ventures, added that Gousto has recently a new CFO, made notable changes to the product, and become more focused on marketing.